Don't Fast Forward This One: Is Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy a Forgettable Comic Book Movie?

I came up with "Don't Fast Forward This One" posts as quick discussions about movies, or specific aspects to specific movies. They're not reviews...just thinking points.

I've read that Warren Beatty tried to get a movie adaptation of the comic strip Dick Tracy created by Chester Gould since 1975.
He finally succeeded in 1990. I was about second grade when Dick Tracy was released, and I was a fan. I even dressed as Dick Tracy for Halloween that year, with a cheap yellow trench coat and plastic fedora hat that had to be Scotch taped before Halloween arrived because I wore it too much before then. I even had a toy two-way wrist radio watch that digitally told time (I think?) and would light up red when pressing the small button on the side.
The movie is a fireworks show of color and sights. It looks like a modern film noir. I struggled unsuccessfully to come up with another movie Dick Tracy resembles. I couldn't find a single one, and I'm open to suggestions.
Dick Tracy came out a year after Tim Burton's Batman gave audiences a new perspective on the caped crusader, completely opposite of Adam West's campy Batman from the TV series of the 1960s. No doubt many audience members were unfamiliar with Frank Miller's dark Batman graphic novels at that time. These took comic book readers away from the corny 60s Batman before the movie took general audiences in that same direction. Burton, I believe, took inspiration from Frank Miller.
Aside from the cinematography, what makes Dick Tracy unique and important is (like Tim Burton's Batman) its demonstration of how a comic book movie can be a serious movie.
The movie is set around the 1940s. A small gang of mafia members (Little Face, the Brow, the Rodent, and Shoulders) are mowed down by a couple of tommy guns in the hands of rival gang members, Flattop and Itchy. Little do Flattop and Itchy know, this massacre was witnessed by a young street kid named..."Kid."
As Dick Tracy investigates, gangster "Lips" Manlis (Paul Sorvino) is forced to hand over his Club Ritz to notorious rival gang leader, Al "Big Boy" Caprice (Al Pacino). Big Boy then gives Lips a "cement bath" and then forces him to spend the rest of his days with the fishes.
Big Boy is determine to take over Lips's little empire, which includes his girlfriend, Breathless Mahoney (Madonna).
Tracy knows Big Boy is behind Lips's disappearance, but needs evidence and Breathless's testimony. What he uncovers in his investigation is bigger than he imagined.
The Dick Tracy comic strips first debut in 1931 by Chester Gould, before Superman and Batman.
They were colorful, silly, and offered a huge rogues gallery for Tracy to fight, each with a visually distinct characteristic stereotypical of mobsters - Pruneface, the Rodent, 88 Keys, the Brow, Lips Manlis, Ribs Macca, B.O. Plenty. The list is long. The idea behind these appearances is that crime is just as ugly on the outside as it is on the inside.
So, with the 1990 film, this silly and cartoonish comic strip became a movie experience that's gritty, even gory at times with scenes of criminals getting sprayed with bullets. It followed the example of Burton's Batman that a comic-based movie doesn't have to be corny or slapsticky.
Let's face it, the Superman movies had some of that. It didn't make those movies bad (well...the first and second Superman, anyways. Let's not talk about parts three and four.)
Dick Tracy demonstrated just how serious a comic movie can be. It's a triumph in its visuals, in its cast of big names (Al Pacino, Madonna, Dustin Hoffman, Warren Beatty...even Dick Van Dyke, James Caan, Catherine O' Hara, and Kathy Bates make cameos), and in its action special effects.
When the movie was released, Dick Tracy's profile was everywhere. Playmates produced a short lived toy line. McDonald's put out one of their sweepstakes games. Nintendo had a video game - a terrible video game! And then, it all just faded away into a footnote.
The story line has been often ridiculed as being uninteresting and lacking.
But Roger Ebert, who said Burton's Batman was "disappointing" called Dick Tracy a "masterpiece of studio artificiality, of matte drawings and miniatures and optical effects." He even claimed Dick Tracy outdid Batman, writing that it was a "sweeter, more optimistic movie."
He does criticize the movie not going into the villains a little more, claiming the movie glimpses over them too quickly. Well, ok...I agree to some degree but with all the villains in the movie, doing so could have been a little too much, and could have hindered the flow of the story.
What Batman started for comic book movies, Dick Tracy took to a new, and yet-to-be-matched, level. It may not be the best comic to movie adaptation. It is definitely far from the worst. Like Batman, it hoisted the genre to more respectable heights. Where Batman turned campy and silly into dark and gritty, Dick Tracy added color while keeping things dark. What Batman started, Dick Tracy helped solidify. I believe modern comic book movies (SpiderMan, The Avengers) can find roots in Warren Beatty's movie. It shouldn't be trodden on, and thrown into the heap of comic book film flops.


Also, as I mentioned the TV series Batman, the show's producer, William Dozier, made a pilot episode for a live-action Dick Tracy series that was similar in style to Batman.
However, as ratings for Batman were dropping at the time, ABC and NBC declined to purchase the series.
The show starred Ray MacDonnell as well as a very young Eve Plumb as a character called "Bonnie Braids." Plumb later stared as Jan Brady on The Brady Bunch.
According to tvobscurities.com, the series was going to be played straight when compared to Batman. Judging on the opening title sequence, found here, the series definitely looked like it would be similar to Batman. (Sigh...what could have been.)